Police officers patrol outside a railway station Saturday in southwestern China’s Yunnan province. China’s official Xinhua News Agency says authorities consider an attack by a group of knife-wielding assailants at a train station to be an act of terrorism.

Train station attack in China leaves 33 dead

By Didi Tang /
The Associated Press

Published Mar 2, 2014 at 12:01AM

BEIJING — More than 10 knife-wielding attackers slashed people at a train station in a southwestern city in what authorities called a terrorist attack by ethnic separatists in western China, and police fatally shot four of the assailants, leaving 33 people dead and 130 others wounded, state media said.

The attackers, most of them dressed in black, stormed the Kunming train station in Yunnan province and started attacking people Saturday evening, according to witnesses.

Student Qiao Yunao was waiting to catch a train at the station when people starting crying and running, and then saw a man slash another man’s neck, drawing blood.

“I was freaking out, and ran to a fast-food store, and many people were running in there to take refuge,” she told The Associated Press via Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog. “I saw two attackers, both men, one with a watermelon knife and the other with a fruit knife. They were running and chopping whoever they could.”

Another witness, Yang Haifei, said he saw a person “come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone.” People who were slow to escape ended up severely injured, he told the official Xinhua News Agency. “They just fell on the ground,” Yang said from a hospital where he was being treated for chest and back wounds.

One suspect was arrested, Xinhua said. Evidence found at the scene of the attack showed that it was “a terrorist attack carried out by Xinjiang separatist forces,” the agency quoted the municipal government as saying. Authorities considered it to be “an organized, premeditated violent terrorist attack.”

The far western region of Xinjiang is home to a simmering rebellion against Chinese rule by separatists among parts of the Muslim Uighur population.

Most attacks blamed on Uighur separatists take place in Xinjiang, but Saturday’s assault took place more than 620 miles to the southeast in Yunnan, which has not had a history of such unrest. However, a suicide car attack blamed on Uighur separatists that killed five people at Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate last November raised alarms that militants may be aiming to strike at targets throughout the country.

In an indication of how seriously authorities viewed the attack — one of China’s deadliest in recent years — the country’s top police official, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu, arrived in Kunming today and went straight to the hospital to visit the wounded and their families, Xinhua reported.